Yesterday was a very cool experience. On Wednesday, my friend _R_ forwarded me an e-mail from someone looking for an interpreter for an anti-war protest on October 2nd. I said I was definitely interested, and he put me in touch with the group. Because I knew it was a small group, I offered a sliding scale for payment. If they could afford $50 for the day, that would be about half what I charged per hour when I first started intepreting two years ago. If they could only afford $20, I’d take that gladly. And if they needed me to work pro bono, well, I’d do that too.

I thought I was going to be late Saturday morning, mostly because I’ve never been to Arlington Cemetery before (despite living in the DC area all my life), and I didn’t know where the Women’s Memorial was located. A crossing guard directed me to where the large clump of people was gathering, and I found my contact person quickly. She was very nice, and provided me with a program and her notes for the speaker introductions so I could get a preview of what was going on. There were at least 100 people there, but I couldn’t tell if my deaf client was there yet. The organizers wanted an interpreter mostly to be accessible, but also because one of the military families was bringing a deaf person.

When the Arlington portion of the ceremony started, I took my place to the left of the stage. I was immediately crowded by members of the press, who kept stopping directly in front of me with big cameras. I had to tap at least four of them on the shoulder and ask them to please avoid blocking the interpreter; one of them went behind me instead and got so close that his camera hit me in the head! I turned around and snapped at him to please give me some room. These were emotional, passionate speakers and I needed room to sign in the same register, which requires a larger signing space. I thought I’d try raising myself a little higher by standing on the edge of the fountain, but I realized that made me harder to see so I went around to the right side of the stage. This is where the mourning military families were standing, and they got a little close to me as well, but they were more conscious of it than the press and eventually moved away so I could work. One amusing part of this ceremony (for me, anyway) was a song performed by Emma’s Revolution. I couldn’t understand anything the vocalist was saying, so I signed in time with the music using phrases like “I…don’t know the words…can’t understand…what she’s saying!” It kept my hands moving, any deaf people in the audience would be amused, and non-signing hearing people wouldn’t know the difference. The funny part is that later in the day someone told me that my signing the song had been “so beautiful…like poetry.” Ha!

When we began the procession along Memorial Drive, I lost track of my main contact person. I decided to walk at the front of the line instead, alongside Gordon Clark, who was going to be doing the introductions for the ceremony on the Ellipse. About halfway along the drive, we encountered a group of counterprotesters. Gordon knew that they were from DC Free Republic, but didn’t know much about them. (Note that the AP wire story is incorrect; the counter-protesters were not lining the route. They were only permitted for a small stretch of Memorial Drive, and that’s where they stayed.) Gordon counseled our marchers to just ignore the taunts from DC Free Republic, and we did. (I was tempted to give them the finger, but I refrained.) I realized they’d make a cool audio blog entry, though, so I paused to step into the street (which was closed off) and aim my cell phone at them. We marched over Memorial Bridge - we even took up the whole length of the bridge, plus some! - and down Henry Bacon Drive. As we got closer to Constitution Avenue, I ran ahead to visit a street vendor and buy some water. (Interpreting actually gives you a rather dry mouth; one of my co-workers keeps a bottle of water with her all the time for this reason.) The first vendor wanted $2.50 for water and soda, so I ran ahead to another vendor. This one wanted $2.00 for water and soda, and didn’t even have any cans of soda at a cheaper price. I explained that I only had $1.50 (which was true), and she let me have a bottle of water. I ran back to the head of the line and drank about half the bottle immediately; I let Gordon have some as well and then polished off the rest of the bottle. As we marched along Constitution, tourists stopped and gawked at us. Many of them took pictures, and I even overheard a woman say “I’ve always wanted to see a protest!” Yeah, lady, me too. Just be glad we’re non-violent!

We encountered a small problem trying to enter the Ellipse. The police captain had told us to go between two stop signs, but there was another officer in a big Escalade SUV blocking our way. The officer refused to move even after Gordon explained we were told to go through there, so we stood and waited for ten minutes before the officer finally moved the vehicle. As we marched into the Ellipse, I took up my spot to the right of the stage. Gordon had promised that the press would be further away than at Arlington Cemetery, but I wasn’t taking any chances and staked out my spot. I asked Elaine Johnson if I could put my purse under her chair, and she let me put it right into her own tote bag for safekeeping.

It was after 2:30 when the second half of the program finally got started. Those of us who had walked the two-mile trip were joined by others carrying anti-war signs who had been waiting for us to arrive; I’m not sure how many people were there but it was probably at least 500. Speakers in the afternoon included members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Arun Ghandi, Mohandas’s grandson, and Lila Lipscomb, profiled in Michael Moore’s movie Farenheit 9/11. (Lila and I even commiserated about the heat; we’d both heard it would be a cool and rainy day so we both wore turtlenecks!) Both Lila’s and Elaine’s speeches were intensely moving. Throughout the afternoon I could hear people sobbing openly, and there were tear-streaked faces throughout the audience. What really impressed me, though, was that I began to feel sad during the speeches. As an interpreter, I’m not usually paying the right kind of attention to the speech to be affected that way. I’m focused on the linguistic content, and I almost never remember what was said after I’m done interpreting. It just doesn’t sink that far into my brain - so if their presentations had me feeling tearful, you can imagine how distressing they were for everyone else.

When all the talking was over, it was time to bring the names to the White House. The backdrop for the ceremony had been 1,000 coffins (made of cardboard, some covered in black fabric and others in American flags)…and members of the U.S. Park Police, who were lined up behind a metal fence about three and a half feet high. When I finally turned around again after I was done interpreting, I noticed that mounted police had joined the standing officers, and there were now paddywagons waiting. As we walked over to the fence with a box full of names on slips of paper, I could see the police had plastic handcuffs at the ready. I got pushed away from Gordon by the crowd but found a spot along the fence anyway. I couldn’t hear his dialogue with the Park Police captain (law enforcement in DC is done by many different agencies, depending on where you are in the city; on the Ellipse it’s the Park Police) but there was no way for me to interpret anyway. A couple hundred of us were crushed along the fence and I had a press guy with his camera on top of me (he was nice about it) so I couldn’t have made myself visible if any deaf people wanted to know what was happening. I did catch snippets of what Gordon was saying, including that he just wanted an hour of President Bush’s time. (I later found out that Bush wasn’t even at home.) When the captain was obviously not going to let us through, Gordon clambered over the fence and was promptly ushered to his knees by officers. A few dozen other protesters joined him, getting directly to their knees instead of trying to bring those names to the White House. (I’ve seen the act of civil disobedience reported as “sitting on the other side of the fence” but that was not the goal, it was just what ended up happening.) Those of us on the permitted side of the fence yelled and screamed at the officers, and I saw one running his Handycam and demanded to know why he was filming us. We continued reading the names of people killed in Iraq - American military and Iraqi civilians - and tossing the slips of paper over the fence; I was so vocal that a guy behind me asked me to yell out the name on his paper, so I did! I also yelled out “if the Park Police are stretched so thin, why do you need to worry about a bunch of non-violent protesters?” I asked the officer nearest me if they would handcuff a deaf person, and he nodded. I said “you’d take away their voice?” and he nodded again. Awful! At one point my urge to climb over the fence was pretty strong, but instead I yelled to those who already had: “we may not be at a point in our lives where we can join you across this fence, but we support you!” A couple of them yelled back “we know!” and that made me feel better. The police finally started handcuffing them (including Michael Berg, the father of slain contractor Nicholas Berg) and we cried out in support.

Much of the crowd at the fence had dwindled by this time; some having gone to help take down the coffins (which will be used on October 23rd at a protest at the Lincoln Memorial), and others simply having left for home. I extricated myself from the remaining people and sought out my contact person. We’d already exchanged business cards, and she said she was pretty sure they could get me $100 for my work! I’ll have to wait a few days - they have to get everybody out of jail before they can have their post-protest conference call! But that’s fine with me. After I got home, I spent most of the night watching the news looking for glimpses of myself. Most of the local channels carried some coverage of the protest, but all of their shots were tight on the speaker and didn’t include me! After having those cameras in my face the whole day, I had rather been hoping for some TV time. I did enjoy seeing footage from the day’s events, though. I was completely exhausted and couldn’t even read, I just browsed through the pretty pictures in some catalogs. My girlfriend rubbed my feet - except for two five-minute breaks, I had been standing for at least seven hours - and I was very glad to go to sleep.